Public Address - Hard News (Home)

One eye on the game | Nov 22, 2005 09:11

I had written a pungent and thorough post about the use and abuse of language, and I do have a couple of good guest posts about TVNZ in the bag, but given that my colleagues have chimed in with any amount of erudition today, I'll content myself with some one-eyed observations about the rugby.

The England match must have been a cracker, because I have not only watched it (and in particular, that last, thrilling 25 minutes) three times, I downloaded the torrent (it's here and still in good nick, if you live somewhere - like Australia! - where they didn't screen the game) and I feel more comfortable every time I see it.

In which spirit, you might enjoy this:

Sunday-Times
November 20, 2005
Stephen Jones: Black knights

FOR New Zealand, an astonishing victory over England... for the English, a nightmare that came true.

New Zealand's 23-19 success at a disbelieving Twickenham stadium in London yesterday was awesome.

The whole of England had been up in arms of late at the sight of New Zealand at the top of the world rugby rankings, and the hosts were desperate to crush the burgeoning hopes of the colonials in the World Cup to follow in 2007.

Yet New Zealand was able to win more convincingly than the score suggests. They also won when far from their best.

Their heroism and composure were magnificent, with Jerry Collins and Carl Hayman in the forwards operating at the highest class. But the technical merit of their performance was less satisfying, indicating that New Zealand can play off-key and still beat the defending World Champions.

And they inflicted humiliation on their hosts in one amazing passage of play, holding out against superior numbers when Tony Woodcock, Neemia Tialata and Chris Masoe were in the sin-bin. Surviving the siege gave New Zealand a massive psychological advantage for the rest of the match.

"It was heroic and gutsy, the team were brilliant," said Graham Henry, the All Black coach. "To play well against these guys, back-to-back-to-back wins over the World Champions, that's brilliant. To hold on with 13 men was
defensively outstanding."

The Kiwi captain Tana Umaga was quick to pay tribute to his team's resilience: "I said to the boys not many southern hemisphere teams have won here. Even the Wallabies have only won a few games up here. But England know they're going to get a lot better. They made mistakes and so did we."

Umaga said many people thought New Zealand would crack after the England started slotting dodgy penalties.

"We said, 'Let's crack them, let's not fold'," he added. "The second half was so stop-start. It was a little bit all over the place and we never felt we got much continuity. We made a few too many errors but we won the game."

No, it's not for real. It's a very able little parody posted to rec.sport.rugby.union (sorry, the original poster's name is lost), based on this story that Stephen Jones really did write, when England beat the All Blacks in Wellington in 2003, after having two players sin-binned for professional fouls rather more blatant than those that saw Woodcock, Tialata and Masoe marched on Saturday.

In 2005, naturally, things were different. For Jones, the All Blacks cheated their way to victory, while England, despite not actually winning the game on the scoreboard, "showed the way to the rest of the world" and made the All Blacks "look ordinary".

Without venturing into the detail of those offences, it seems fair to say that on most days they would not have occasioned a yellow card, especially for Tialata, who was marched for his first offence (being a fat man on the wrong side of the ruck) after being on the park for a few minutes.

Meanwhile, at one point England (and especially Lewis Moody) conceded a string of penalties for killing the ball and were warned six times about play off the ball and after the whistle - and the only reason one of them went off was because he was exhausted from being totally owned by Carl Hayman in the scrums.

Vickery's effort in rucking Chris Jack's head has gone strangely missing from English reports of the game, and I would think that a really brave Irishman could have penalised England twice in the last couple of minutes (holding on in one tackled ball, flopping over another). Whatever. We won. Jerry Collins (a "journeyman" there to make up the numbers, according to Jones) was a giant.

Yamis from Blogging it Real and Spiro Zavos have useful commentaries on why the idea that the IRB should have given the Rugby World Cup to Japan to "develop the game globally" doesn't really stack up.

And on another tip entirely, I'm chairing a Book Council event tomorrow evening called Why is History So Hot?, featuring a panel of Ranginui Walker, the editors of the new illustrative history Frontier of Dreams, Bronwyn Dalley and Gavin McLean, and publishers Geoff Walker and Peter Dowling.

It's at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Auckland (arrive 5.30pm for a 6pm start). Cost: $13 Book Council members, $15 students, $18 non-members (ticket price includes a glass of wine). You can book via events@bookcouncil.org.nz or call 0800 258 255.

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Rugby will be the winner on the day | Nov 18, 2005 10:06

I've been a little surprised that no one today appears to have noted that when we host Rugby World Cup 2011, it will (failing some sort of coalition collapse) also be an election year. And that if the tournament dates are similar to those in Australia 2003 (where the final was held on November 22) both the campaign and polling day itself will fall in the midst of the whole extravaganza. That will be interesting.

Will it change the tone of the campaign? Will we be unwilling to show the rest of the rugby-loving world the kind of divisions that emerged in this year's campaign? 2011 might be a good election to be fighting from the Treasury benches - which makes 2008 all the more sharp.

I was interviewed by One News sports reporter Paul Moor on our chances of winning the Cup bid this week, with my "social commentator" hat on. There had been a good deal of our innate moodiness at large: nobody else remembers Pinetree Meads, do they? And Helen Clark: she's a league supporter, isn't she? And besides: we're too small.

And yet if you looked at the stories from Dublin, it was clear that it wasn't so cut-and-dried. The South Africans were relaxed, the Japanese had barely turned up - and the New Zealand delegation was positively amping. The effort paid off, and our little economy's habit of moving from one focal event to another continues.

This is going to bring in a lot of money. But more to the point, I think, rugby will be the winner on the day. People in places like Invercargill and Rotorua will rise to it; they'll fill their little stadia for down-table matches because they love the game. The challenge will be making ready for the big matches in the main centres. If ever there was an incentive to bowl Carisbrook and start again, this is it.

Now, it remains for the All Blacks to cap it all off and deliver England a towelling on Sunday morning. They surely won't lack for motivation. But will they perform the new haka? And will the British ever stop whining about the haka?

One point really needs to be made about Gerald Davies' pissy little rant for The Times: the idea that Brian O'Driscoll suffered retribution in the first Lions test this year because he had somehow responded to the haka in an insulting fashion does not stand up. Like the mysterious, callous nurse who demended his jersey, this story comes to us solely from O'Driscoll. As far as I am aware, no New Zealander, brown or white, has ever publicly said anything that would endorse it. Now would seem like a good time to stop recycling it.

The other good news for today, in a rather smaller way, is that we're making available the final piece of the Lange speech project: the track. One of the reasons I held on for the right to provide a downloadable version of the Oxford Union speech (rather than a streamed one) this year was that I wanted it to be available for derivative use. This has now come to pass with the posting of Andrew B. White's musical adaptation of the speech.

What surprised and delighted me about Andrew's track is that he actually encapsulated the speech, rather than just running some samples over a beat. The key points are there, and it has a beginning, a middle and an end. I kicked off both this week's Great Blend events with the track, and now you can download it as a nice, chunky 192Kbit/s MP3.

Feel free to grab it, stick in your playlist, burn it to CD and/or play it on your radio station. You may also further adapt it, so long as you comply with the Creative Commons licence which specifies attribution, no commercial use (yes, obviously, playing it on a commercial radio station might constitute commercial use, but that's not the same) and sharing alike.

At the other end of the copyright spectrum: could Sony BMG's DRM debacle possibly get any worse? As it happens, yes. Way worse.

On the heels of news that Sony BMG's official patch for its own malware actually makes host PCs more vulnerable, comes news that unacknowledged chunks of open-source code released under the GPL and LGPL and others, including some code originally written to bypass Apple's iTunes DRM. The Sony Boycott blog has more.

If Sony BMG (via its software provider, First4Internet) is found to have flouted legitimate licences, the company might fall foul of the very harsh penalties it urged on the US government.

There has been some wild speculation as to the theoretical extent of Sony's exposure (eg: 200,000 infringing CDs sold at statutory damages of $75,000 per infringing copy = $15 billion) but I suspect it would be nothing quite so large even if action was taken. The DMCA seems to focus on wilfull infringement in penalty-setting, so it would more likely be First4Internet that copped it hard. It is still, without any doubt, a shocker.

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Probably the wrong inquiry | Nov 17, 2005 10:33

If we're to have a select committee inquiry into TVNZ, would it be possible to have one that seriously explores the role and structure of the state broadcaster, rather than a hunt for political zingers? For all that the business of Susan Wood's contract has been a debacle, it's quite peripheral to the real issue of where we want TVNZ to go.

It's really impossible to tell from Georgina Te Heu Heu's burbling interview on Checkpoint yesterday exactly what terms of reference National will seek for the inquiry - there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of vision going on there - but I think Paul Norris's column for the Herald today is substantially correct. I'll quote it at length (from the Herald Premium Content blog, which has moved from Blogger to a LiveJournal format as a result of a DMCA complaint):

Opposition politicians calling for a public inquiry on the basis that a public asset is losing value reveal their failure to understand the charter or public broadcasting. Commercial value must not be the only measure of success. Where is their assessment of public value, of the social and cultural benefits that accrue from public broadcasting?

Commercial value does become a key factor if the asset is to be sold, which is certainly the cry from some critics. TVNZ has botched the job so badly there is nothing for it but to cut the losses and privatise - effectively the final abuse of a public asset. No doubt there could be a ready sale to a Murdoch or a Packer, but does anybody imagine that, when the chips are down, such foreign moguls would put our public interest before the private interests of their shareholders?

Their commitment to New Zealand programmes and stories would depend on how much money they could extract from NZ On Air for commercial programmes. Do we really want a return to the late 90s when a thoroughly commercial TVNZ refused NZ On Air money even for documentaries?

There are ways forward. The boldest strategy would be to encourage the public broadcaster to demonstrate that it can create more public value, especially from the opportunities afforded by the digital future.

TVNZ has been working for some time to create a digital free-to-air platform, together with CanWest and Prime. Once such a platform is launched, many new channels will be possible, indeed desirable, as new channels are one reason why viewers switch to digital.

TVNZ could create a number of new channels of largely charter content. One might be a factual channel, with new international documentaries, minority programmes at accessible times, and repeats of factual programmes. Other channels could be targeted at children, drama and the arts, or lifestyle.

Norris believes the dual remit - charter and commerce - can be made to work, but I'm ready to consider a case for radical change: perhaps even selling off TV2 and more clearly defining the public function of TV One. The strange and unhappy news this week that Frontseat is to have its run slashed and the NZ Festival season, which delivered the brilliant Colin McCahon: I Am documentary this year, will be gone in 2007 suggests that things are not working as they are.

I'm happy for charter money to be used to make charter programmes, but not for it to simply be a slush fund for commercial programming. For all the political excitement over TVNZ's news and current affairs activities, I've yet to meet a TVNZ journalist who is seriously unhappy with editorial management there. The broadcaster's ever-changing commissioning practices, on the other hand, warrant serious examination that they probably won't get.

There is much to be said in favour of New Zealand's contestable funding model - as the audiences and awards for TV3's Bro' Town and Outrageous Fortune testify - but there is a role that it cannot fulfil. To take but one example, Britain enjoys Freeview, a free-to-air digital TV service using cheap decoders available at retail, almost solely because the BBC weighed in behind the service.

(The irony here is that Freeview was also only possible because the digital terrestrial network was a sunk cost, left behind after the grisly collapse of ITV's private digital venture. The digital joint venture originally proposed by TVNZ in 1999 would very probably have resulted in a scandalous collapse - the prospective international partner, NTL, nearly went bankrupt in the year following - but after the smoke cleared it might have left us with some very handy transmission capacity.)

TVNZ does not enjoy, and will never, the £3 billion annual revenue that allows the BBC to act with the scope it does, but not everything in the vision requires piles of money. It's about redefining the public broadcaster's relationship with the public, and I'm beginning to lose faith that a patched-up version of a structure originally designed to prepare TVNZ for a trade sale can do that.

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Communication Fatigue | Nov 16, 2005 10:06

"Could you point out Che Tibby for me?" asked the nice woman from State Services. Over there, I said - the tall dude in the blue shirt. And by the way, you're the third person to ask me that in 10 minutes. Our Che, it would seem, has a cult following in the public sector.

"He doesn't look like I thought he would," she said.

No. We were all looking for a dude with dreadlocks the first time he hooked up with the rest of the PA crew in Auckland. But even in his respectable, post-PhD phase, there's still a whiff of eau de bogan about him.

We were networking (or, if you prefer, milling around, drinking and listening to Ladi Six) after Wellington's mini-Great Blend on Monday night. It went just as well as Sunday's event in Auckland, and I'm really grateful to Ashley Highfield for making the long, long trip from London for our events. Richard Naylor's son videoed it and it'll be posted online, as will footage from the Auckland event. I'll have another special download related to the events for you in the next day or two.

Just one thing: I'm a bit grumpy about the fact that around 30 people RSVPd for the Wellington event but didn't turn up, which meant that we needlessly turned away people who actually did want to be there. For shame, you lot.

Afterwards we adjourned to The Matterhorn, which was going quite thoroughly off. Lee Prebble's little bro' Ryan was doing a sort of Ben Harper thing for an appreciative crowd, and the place was packed ("This is Monday night, isn't it?" asked Ashley, rather startled by the Wellington nightlife.). We set about enthusiastically unwinding, I met Barnaby Weir and by the time the Pead girls and I left, 2am was looming.

When I opened my eyes yesterday, it was 8.05am and it dawned on me that if I was to make my flight back to Auckland, I'd need to be in a taxi in 25 minutes' time. Which, with some effort, I was. I didn't do much on arrival: I was a little hungover, a bit short of sleep, but mostly just suffering communication fatigue. There were urgent emails that went unanswered yesterday.

But I'm back on the horse today. And those of you who enjoy National Radio's Off the Wire might be especially interested in tonight's recording at the Classic Comedy Club in Auckland, because it's Damian Christie's debut on the programme. I'm on too, so it's a bit of a Public Address benefit. If you want to join us, you can call Linda at Radio New Zealand on 367 9320 or email tickets@thedownlowconcept.com . The recording starts at 6.30pm, but you'll want to arrive a bit before that.

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